What does Jeff Bezos think is going to happen?
https://reprog.wordpress.com/2026/07/05/what-does-jeff-bezos-think-is-going-to-happen/
speckx · 2 days ago
23 comments
https://reprog.wordpress.com/2026/07/05/what-does-jeff-bezos-think-is-going-to-happen/
speckx · 2 days ago
23 comments
O5vYtytb · 2 days ago
Maybe you should ask Andy Jassy, the current CEO?
rzzzt · 2 days ago
Does Andy know what Jeff thinks is going to happen?
__MatrixMan__ · 2 days ago
> Well, from now on the workflow will be:
> - Find the book I want on Amazon.
> - Buy it.
> - Find the same book on a torrent site.
> - Download it.
> - Physically copy it onto the Kindle via a USB cable.
Wait a second... you're rewarding Amazon and the publisher for their bad behavior by continuing to buy from Amazon? Nothing about this plan is discouraging the problem.
Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
stavros · 2 days ago
The next sentence says:
> And it can hardly escape anyone’s notice that I would achieve exactly the same end-state — the book on my Kindle — if I just skipped the first two stages.
__MatrixMan__ · 2 days ago
Sure but why pussyfoot around the issue? We should be actively encouraging each other to punish misbehaving companies. It's the right thing to do.
They're deaf to anything besides pain. If you want to help your fellow humans, you need to inflict that pain. Otherwise the company won't change.
stavros · 2 days ago
I agree, but I think that the author is saying the same thing.
munk-a · 2 days ago
I think by spelling out the process in this manner and then highlighting the absurdity of the first two steps your argument is defusing a lot of the bad faith responses that are likely to arise.
It does feel cumbersome to execute the argument in this manner but it feels rationally defensive.
breuleux · 2 days ago
I just see it as a way to highlight the absurdity. They're heavily implying they won't buy books on Amazon anymore in the next paragraph:
> So it looks as though this move — both mean-spirited and commercially incompetent — will result in the loss of about 50 book sales per year.
jldugger · 2 days ago
> Sure but why pussyfoot around the issue? We should be actively encouraging each other to punish misbehaving companies. It's the right thing to do.
Probably because doing what you suggest would not look great in court:
"Dear Jeff Bezos,
Here is my signed confession letter of intellectual property theft.
Yours Truly, Mike Taylor"
randallsquared · 2 days ago
The poster isn't pussyfooting around the issue, he's feigning discovery to emphasize the point as a rhetorical move.
OsrsNeedsf2P · 2 days ago
Right? I never understood why people think it's morally right to buy books/movies/music from predatory service providers
Aarostotle · 2 days ago
It’s very simple.
They purchased the right to distribute the books on their terms.
You don’t like the terms, so you call them predatory. You want the product, so you just take it on your own terms.
Morally, that’s no different than your employer just deciding to pay you less than your contract states, because he decides he doesn’t like the terms of the agreement anymore.
You don’t gain a right to take things just because you want them or need them.
ElevenLathe · 2 days ago
Your morality is pretty strange if it equates ignoring some of the more odious terms in a hundred-page click-through EULA to knowingly engaging in wage theft. I would honestly like to hear you explain that further.
saaaaaam · 2 days ago
Authors’ wages are paid by people buying their books.
Aarostotle · 2 days ago
The moral principle here is just property rights.
One case is more complex than the other, but that does not change the fundamental.
Two cases: 1) Two parties agree to a trade under certain terms, one party decides he does not like the terms, and decides he wants to take the benefit without complying with the agreement. 2) One party decides he does not like the offered terms, does not accept the agreement, but takes the benefit anyway.
With that said, I think you have a point that the current way EULAs work are questionable under contract law. They're specifically designed to be unreadable and to encourage people not to read them, not to keep up with updates, and generally to be unaware of terms they've agreed to. I'd be interested in some smart legislative reform here and I'm hoping you can point me to some people doing good work in this area.
There's a live issue here, but the fact that contract law has flaws does not give anyone the right to defraud or steal.
Eddy_Viscosity2 · 1 days ago
Its the enormous power differential between the two parties that changes the moral dynamic. There is no compromise and no negotiation possible, which are the foundations of fair contracts. Couple that with effective monopolies and you have a situation with no moral authority. Just super powerful entities pushing around weaker ones because they can.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai · 2 days ago
It's even simpler than that:
Genuine rights cannot be transferred. Everything else is just an attempt to somehow determine who is allowed to make money from what. You shouldn’t take this too seriously, and certainly shouldn’t turn it into a fetish. You should treat it like traffic rules: if no one is watching and it’s obvious that no one can get hurt, then you can basically do whatever you want. It’s very important to clearly distinguish true morality from this false morality, which is nothing more than the preservation of existing privileges. Those who fail to make this distinction tend to neglect true morality.
Aarostotle · 2 days ago
Your argument isn’t simple, it’s word salad.
You can easily transfer a right of ownership. You can bake a cake and I can buy it from you; once that happens, it is theft for you to take the cake and eat it.
Both of these are expressions of an inalienable right to property.
Marsymars · 2 days ago
You could have strong property rights for physical goods while simultaneously having no intellectual property rights - there's nothing that makes the latter instrinsically follow from the former.
Aarostotle · 2 days ago
Physical property rights and intellectual property rights have the same root: That someone did work to produce a value, and by right, has ownership of it. This is even how homesteading laws worked when there was widespread wilderness. A person could go to empty land, cultivate it, and after a set time of productive use, gain a legal claim over it.
In the modern context, this is pretty easy to project.
Surely you agree that you have a property right to your computer. How did you get it? You purchased it from the manufacturer (or a retailer, who purchased it from them). The laptop itself was their property from the moment it was made.
What about the factory that made it? Surely, the factory is their property, too. It would be theft for you to get a gang to go and take it over, just as it would be theft for you to loot its machinery and supplies. A factory, though, isn't just a building. It's a set of processes, designs, and techniques that a company uses to build products. For the same reasons and in the same way, those ideas — that intellectual property — belong to the company.
Similarly, a book on your shelf is yours. The store bought it from the printer, who was contracted by a publisher, who paid the author to write it. The fact that _you don't like these middlemen_ doesn't give you the right to steal from all of them.
To those of you who rationalize your thieving behavior: It makes you an entitled child.
The ideas in the book are the author's intellectual property, and only because that exists, you can claim any right to own your copy of the book as physical property.
So, no, you cannot have strong property rights for physical goods while simultaneously having no intellectual property rights. That is a complete contradiction.
Marsymars · 2 days ago
> For the same reasons and in the same way, those ideas — that intellectual property — belong to the company.
No, it's for fundamentally different reasons.
Physical property rights exist to protect people.
IP rights exist to benefit society other than the IP rights holders - either by a) incentivizing inventions (patents, that expire) or b) incentivizing creative works (copyright, that expire) or c) trademarks (that explicitly exist to prevent consumer confusion).
"Processes" and "techniques" that aren't patentable don't "belong" to a company with a factory in any legal or moral sense, and if they are patentable, they only belong to the company for the defined term of the patent, after which they belong to the public via public domain.
atmavatar · 2 days ago
> (copyright, that expire)
For all practical purposes, copyrights no longer expire.
Any creative work made in your lifetime is unlikely to enter the public domain within your lifetime unless it was made during your childhood, the author holds the copyright rather than assigning it to a corporation, and the author already has one foot in the grave at the time of its creation.
Average US life expectancy is 79 years, humans develop their capacity for memory between 3-7 years, and copyright in the US lasts for 70 years after the author dies, so any creative work you'd remember from your childhood will only enter the public domain in your lifetime if the author dies within 2-6 years of creating it.
Marsymars · 2 days ago
Well, I'm not American, and the regulatory capture that you describe, and America's efforts to impose it on the world in order to benefit American corporations is detrimental to society at large.
But even if copyright takes a long time to expire, there's still a pile of culturally significant stuff coming into public domain every year. e.g. it's good that the works of Arthur Conan Doyle are now in the public domain.
__MatrixMan__ · 2 days ago
> Physical property rights and intellectual property rights have the same root
Intellectual property rights came about when The Church wanted to use them to prevent people from using printing presses to distribute the wrong kind of bible. They have nothing to do with property in the sense of something that you lose access to when it gets stolen.
Aarostotle · 2 days ago
It appears that you read the first clause of the first line, grepped your dogmas, and posted the first thing that came back.
My existing post already precludes your point.
__MatrixMan__ · 2 days ago
Where do you get inalienable from? Whatever rights to property you enjoy are granted by the consensus of the people around you. If you piss them off enough, they'll revoke those rights.
Aarostotle · 2 days ago
The idea that rights are inalienable is a fundamental moral principle of every modern free society. People can violate your rights. That doesn't mean that your rights go away. If someone steals your laptop, you do not lose your right to that property. If the people around you form a mob and burn down your house, they haven't revoked your rights, they have committed a moral crime against you — they've violated your rights.
I wonder if your question is facetious or ignorant, but I will answer you as though it is earnest: I get it from great thinkers such as John Locke, George Mason, and Thomas Jefferson. To the extent that you support any kind of civilizational progress, you have these thinkers and their ideas to thank.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai · 2 days ago
> Your argument isn’t simple, it’s word salad.
That’s not very nice. I can assure you that I read everything you write here with the same contempt and accuse you of at least the same intellectual dishonesty. I just wouldn’t have put it so bluntly.
If I’m hungry, I’ll just take a piece of your cake and eat it, no matter who it belongs to. Everyone should do that. And if you refuse to share the cake, you should (and will) receive a just punishment for it.
bspammer · 2 days ago
Did you read to the end of that list and then close the article?
joe_mamba · 2 days ago
>Cut out the middlemen. Torrent it and send the author some money.
If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?
Maybe because those middlemen platforms provide a combination of discoverability, user review rating system, network effect, convenience, and trusted return policy at scale that's valuable to both consumers and developers/authors enough for both parties to tolerate it as the status quo even if it's not perfect, it's just good enough to be the default.
CuriouslyC · 2 days ago
Because Amazon gets millions of views per day, and their personal website gets a dozen or so. Literally the only reason.
zbentley · 2 days ago
> why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
Some do!
shimman · 2 days ago
Read the Rifter's trilogy because of this, quite good IMO. Made buying Blindsight in hardcopy way easier once money wasn't a strain.
paul7986 · 2 days ago
or use Cloudflare's "Pay Per Use," tech so real humans and or more so AI sucking up your content for free is forced to pay you something to gain access.
MaKey · 2 days ago
Cloudflare is just another middleman.
paul7986 · 2 days ago
sure but it would be nice if AI paid it's fair share in many different ways for humans keeping it relevant. Open AI wants to provide all Americans stock options, which is one way but the more the merrier.
joe_mamba · 2 days ago
>sure but it would be nice if AI paid it's fair share in many different ways for humans keeping it relevant
Oh that's coming, don;t you worry, the legislative part just hasn't caught up with the LLM business yet since none of them are making much profit yet so there's nothing you can shake out of them yet
What I mean by this is, in many EU countries, the unions of creative artist have lobbied the government to make us pay a "piracy tax" on all storage devices sold in the country, from blank CDs and HHDs to SSDs and mobile phones with EMMC/NAND. The same thing will happen with AI companies, once they become profitable enough, they'll force the consumers subscription prices to include an extra tax that will go back to the major rights holder part of the unions.
paul7986 · 2 days ago
Sure and we as developers can vibe code other systems / ways to ensure we get paid for keeping AI relevant.
joe_mamba · 2 days ago
SW developers don't have the union bargaining power the music and arts industry has. At least not where I live.
the_af · 2 days ago
This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. It doesn't seem necessary to have the infrastructure and pockets of Amazon to sell ebooks (and be fairer to authors and readers).
I'm not convinced about discoverability, I don't browse random books or look for recommendations on Amazon; to me Amazon is the final stop once I know the ebook I want to buy. Literally a search bar for the book I already want. I don't use Amazon as a shelf of books to peruse, and I never look for recommended products (especially not books).
I think it's mostly the integration with Kindle, and the reputation ("I trust Amazon so I'll enter my credit card"). This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform. And Amazon seem hell bent on ruining their reputation...
boznz · 2 days ago
But how do you know the books you want to buy in the first place? That's the Indie creators dilemma, sometimes good creators are terrible marketers, or have no budget, and their creation is undiscovered from the others that spend, market or game the system.
the_af · 2 days ago
I agree it's a difficult problem. For scifi, I usually look for Hugo or Nebula winners, but also word of mouth and recommendations.
Never Amazon! I also don't know anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations, but that might be my bubble.
I buy a LOT of books in brick and mortar stores, my preferred method of browsing books.
boznz · 2 days ago
Yes unfortunately any system can be gamified once the incentives are there: Best wine, best movie, best album, best keyboard, best monitor, the list goes on. Hugo or Nebula winners, and any other "winner" for that matter are usually actively sponsored and artificially pushed onto the nomination lists by their publishers/influencers/etc, there is just no way the judges can read the 1000's of novels that come out each year.
Occasionally indie authors beat the system like Andy Weir with the Martian, but that took both good writing and a lot of traction from his online community for it to go viral and for it to get recognition.
the_af · 2 days ago
True in principle, but I find in practice the Hugo and Nebula seldom disappoint me (in the sense of having wasted my time, not that every winner is a masterpiece). And these are not the only prizes (or genres), I just mentioned two. There are also magazines, reviews, etc. Sometimes following an author you like on Twitter or whatever helps see what they like.
Friend's recommendations aren't gamified. Actual friends I mean, not facebook contacts.
In any case, these were just examples that Amazon is NOT the place to go for browsing books. I'm sure people must do it, but I don't know of anyone who goes to Amazon to look for book recommendations...
joe_mamba · 2 days ago
>This should be relatively easy to disrupt for ebooks. [...] This should be feasible to overcome by a better platform.
If it's so trivial as you claim, then you can put your money where your mouth is and become a millionaire/billionaire by delivering this. Especially now with LLMs, the coding part of the problem should be easier than ever.
the_af · 2 days ago
A snarky reply. I never said "trivial", and I didn't mean it's easy in absolute terms, just that this seems relatively easy to disrupt compared to other endeavors.
I have no desire to become a millionaire and I already have a job, and do I need to remind you of the HN guidelines you've clearly forgotten?
joe_mamba · 2 days ago
You said it's easy to disrupt, as per the quote, and I showed you it really isn't easy to disrupt, because if it was, someone else would have attempted it already.
Now you're shying away from this fact pretending it's snark and invoking then HN rules as a defense shield. What a wiesel.
the_af · 2 days ago
No.
You claimed I said it was "trivial" which I didn't, I said it was "relatively easy".
Then you went into that nonsense of if it's so easy then why don't you do it and become a millionaire yadda yadda, which is a dumb cliche and also uncalled for, since I was merely writing my opinion, not challenging you or calling you out.
> and invoking then HN rules as a defense shield. What a wiesel.
The HN guidelines ask you to reply to the most charitable interpretation of a comment. Do you honestly think that's what you did with your millionaire comment?
> someone else would have attempted it already.
You don't know that it hasn't (or isn't being attempted), and in any case, everything hasn't happened until it does. Like you said, especially now in the age of LLMs, and especially with Amazon become worse and worse.
boznz · 2 days ago
Many of us do. But the majority of ebook readers will: a)never find us and b)just want to click buy now not download epub (from a site they have never heard of) then transfer to kindle manually. So best to cover your bases and give them the Amazon option too.
DrewADesign · 2 days ago
Yeah… There’s a few things I think the tech crowd misses the mark on when discussing media creators of all sorts:
- A vast gulf separates the potential exposure on established platforms vs smaller or DIY platforms, and that dramatically affects income. Same with usability of the platform on a whole. When a nontechnical person sees that they have to put down their phone, boot up a computer (which they might not even own,) download a couple of programs, etc. etc. etc. they’ll be on Amazon, seconds later, pricing out the new kindles. That sucks, but if you make media of any sort for a living, you can’t just pretend that isn’t true.
- There‘a a huge difference in strategy between being a hobbyist/side hustler and being a full-time professional. You can’t just scale your hobby business up like that.
- Wanting to make a living as a writer, designer, artist, musician, etc. is not a moral failure. Few would deride developers who want to be paid for their work instead of exclusively making FOSS software and hoping for donations. I’m not sure why creatives doing the same thing are seen as greedy.
mekoka · 2 days ago
> If this is the ideal model, why don't authors skip the middleman themselves and just put the .pdf/.epub on their website directly in exchange for donations?
> On the same note, why do game devs need to give Steam 30% of their money and not just sell to the public directly and pocket the 30%?
We're needlessly making this into a general problem. Why hastily discuss ideal models? The current model is fine and the issue isn't generalized. We're talking about having the option to skip asshole middlemen, or to be more specific, Amazon. A company so big that solving this special case on its own leaps us a huge portion of the way into solving the problem at large.
Is the general sentiment that Steam is also an asshole?
Georgelemental · 2 days ago
If you read what follows, he makes it very clear he intends to do more or less what you suggest
badgersnake · 2 days ago
Or just buy an actual book from and independent bookshop.
Cider9986 · 2 days ago
That doesn't cut out the publisher.
shimman · 2 days ago
Publishers aren't as evil compared to big tech. Maybe a random lieutenant of hell versus Lucifer's advisor here.
You can also buy DRM free self-published books quite easily nowadays. Amazon doesn't have a monopoly on e-commerce, not yet at least.
lstodd · 2 days ago
> Publishers aren't as evil compared to big tech.
Haha yes, they are even more evil en masse.
themadturk · 2 days ago
Most publishers demand their ebooks be sold with DRM. This can be seen as an aspect of "evil."
saaaaaam · 2 days ago
That’s fine if you have one near to you, don’t have mobility issues that make it hard to visit or accessibility issues that make book print hard to read. And it stocks the kinds of books you want to read. Without being all woke about it, indie book stores can be great if you like reading the sorts of books your particular local flavour of indie book stores stocks.
Marsymars · 2 days ago
Most indie bookstores will happily order books for you from the publisher/distributor if they don't have them in stock.
dingaling · 2 days ago
At which point I might as well order from the publisher's website instead of having to explain to a shop owner what I want.
Marsymars · 2 days ago
May work better in some countries than others; e.g. checking the book I'm currently reading that's published by Hachette, my local indie book store sells it for the same price as amazon.ca, (and I can easily order online, there's no need to "explain to a shop owner what I want") but Hachette doesn't seem to have any B2C online front that I'm able to order from.
InsideOutSanta · 2 days ago
As somebody who wrote a book in the past, yes, this. Give Amazon no money. If you want to spend money because pirating makes you feel bad, send a few bucks to the author, buy something on the publisher's store, or go to your local book store and spend some money there.
But never feel bad about not sending money to Amazon.
pointlessone · 2 days ago
How much money? I mean, the natural answer is full price but that’s not the amount the author gets from a regular sale. There’s a whole range where it’s cheaper to freebooters and still more profitable to the author.
I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming.
I suppose there’s a similar dynamic in publishing where the overhead created by all the intermediaries is significant compared to the actual work done by the author, editor, designers, and so on.
InsideOutSanta · 1 days ago
If you send the author half of what the book costs, there's an almost 100% chance this is more than they would have made if you had bought the book. If you send the author 20%, that's roughly what most authors earn per book sale. It can be substantially higher or lower depending on a bunch of factors, but I think it's a reasonable rule of thumb.
> I’ve seen an argument that buying an album from a musician (or a physical media or merch) and pirating the rest of their library in most cases more profitable to the musician than streaming.
Streaming is a particularly brutal example for musicians. Book authors make quite a bit more per book sale than musicians make per stream.
__MatrixMan__ · 1 days ago
Wouldn't it be cool if we could get to the point where authors (and artists generally) are making more from voluntary direct payments than they are from the platforms?
It would be a great way to demonstrate how broken the funding model is, and all of that money would be money that didn't contribute to the surveillance/censorship tech that copyright is used to justify.
shinycode · 2 days ago
Actually if authors could sell directly I’ll gladly buy from them each and every time and cut off the middle man.
rzzzt · 2 days ago
What is making it complex for authors to sell directly?
Edit: hah, only 15 minutes late with my attempt at Socratic spiel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48810056
saaaaaam · 2 days ago
A lot of authors are not technical people and/or are busy writing. There isn’t a simple system with a large audience of potential book purchasers that makes it easy for authors to sell their books because Amazon became that place but now wants to irritate its users by mangling the kindle.
shinycode · 2 days ago
Also unfortunately the problem lies when the platform has too much power and makes this relationship with the author disproportionate. At first such a platform seems like a good deal for everyone, except when it stops being one
tzs · 2 days ago
> What is making it complex for authors to sell directly?
If an author living at place X sells directly to a reader living at place Y and it is not true that for all governments G PlaceInJurisdictionOf(X,G) == PlaceInJurisdictionOf(Y,G), then the author is making a cross border sale which can have annoying tax considerations.
The internet made it very easy for someone to physically run a small business that conducts transactions across dozens or even hundreds of borders, especially if they are selling intangible goods, but as far as I know the legal environment has not been updated for that.
Hence it is a lot easier to use a middleman who handles the legal stuff with cross border transactions and you only have to deal with the middleman.
shinycode · 2 days ago
True, my original view of the matter was too simplistic
verzali · 1 days ago
Marketing, mostly.
lstodd · 2 days ago
the decision is on you: if you like it, you send some cash. if you just send five bucks that'll be like what author gets from about a hundred "legitimate sales".
__MatrixMan__ · 2 days ago
Sure, that sounds grand, but if setting up a little store is too much to ask, I'd settle for a consistent way to just send them money.
I'd love it if voluntary payment could be mobilized to the point where it's more profitable to authors than the shit treatment they're getting from Amazon. For many, piracy is about rejecting the problematic distribution mechanism, not stinginess. It would be great to have a way to provably put our money where our mouths are (provably, because making Amazon look bad is part of the fun).
jtbayly · 2 days ago
Or buy it literally from anybody other than Amazon.
francisofascii · 2 days ago
Assuming the author and publisher are not evil, you want to at least give them their legitamate cut.
__MatrixMan__ · 2 days ago
Sure, but they've claimed to "sell" you something, and now they're making your continued "ownership" of that thing contingent upon some future purchase. "Evil" is maybe a strong word, but I see no reason to continue playing by their rules after shenanigans of that sort.
tsujamin · 2 days ago
I ended up migrating to ebooks.com and importing them into Calibre (after some work to get Adobe Digital Editions to import nicely) and using that to manage my Kindle. Did the same with my old Amazon library too when they were talking about stopping you exporting the azw3's
trencedamp · 2 days ago
I went to kobo when my Kindle told me if would no longer work. Now I don't buy anything from Amazon
SoftTalker · 2 days ago
I have a kobo. I use it to check out books from the library via Libby/Overdrive. I have never purchased an e-book.
Marsymars · 2 days ago
I find that integration near-useless. Even obscure books (if available) tend to have a multi-month wait at my library. Since the wait times seem to be semi-random, it's basically impossible to queue up books in a way that syncs up to my pace of reading.
(I guess if I really wanted to, at my rough reading pace of one book per week, I could place a hold on two books per week, and on average every week I'd get two books available, pick one to read, and just cycle the other back into the hold queue.)
SoftTalker · 2 days ago
Hmm, I've had pretty good success with it. The current bestsellers are hard to get, but haven't really had a problem with anything else. I wonder if it depends on the library?
Marsymars · 2 days ago
Yeah, I'm sure it does - libraries buy licenses to a specific number of books that can be lent out. I've got no insight into how the licenses my library has stack up against other libraries though.
asveikau · 2 days ago
Came here to complain about this workflow too.
If you don't want to resort to piracy, there are many vendors that sell epubs with weak DRM and presumably give money to publishers. Ebooks.com is one. If you have not already, I would recommend looking into calibre for managing such titles.
(I did this even when I used to buy from Kindle, first thing I would do is break the DRM and put it into calibre even if I was only reading on Amazon devices, because I never trusted Amazon in the first place. But supposedly the DRM breaking flow is broken with new kindle releases.)
mjhay · 2 days ago
Buying the physical book from Amazon isn’t a great way to stick it to Bezos. Just have your local bookstore order it for you, it’s easy.
pyrale · 2 days ago
If you want to stick it to Jeff, the best part is to give/lend/sell them once you've read them. Or even better, get them from the (public) library.
bluefirebrand · 2 days ago
Jeff doesn't care what you do after you've already given him the money though
Yes, you prevent him from selling a copy to your friend, but he already has your money!
Dumblydorr · 2 days ago
Jeff doesn’t care what you do period. They’re in another plane, it’s some poor schmucks now with only a few million fighting for table scraps of the billionaires who don’t care.
badgersnake · 2 days ago
Cancel your prime is a good start.
b40d-48b2-979e · 2 days ago
Or just get it from your library. I rarely find myself re-visiting books, so that model is ideal to me.
toomuchtodo · 2 days ago
With regards to buying physical books, https://bookshop.org/ or https://betterworldbooks.com/ are better options than Amazon imho if you're not going to buy from your local bookstore. Bookshop allows you to configure your local bookshop to receive a cut of your purchases from Bookshop (https://bookshop.org/pages/bookstores).
The public library is of course an option as many mention, assuming they have the book in their inventory. You might also be able to check it out from https://openlibrary.org/
ah1508 · 2 days ago
I agree, easy and much more pleasant. Walk down the street, go into the bookshop (which is by essence a place in 3D, much more pleasant than a screen), search for a book, find it, turn a few pages, chat with the seller or with someone else interested by a book you liked, buy the book you came for, and another one you did not plan to buy, stop somewhere to drink a coffee, open the first few pages, etc... How can a website reproduce this "quality of life" ?? No need to live like during covid and lockdowns. If you live 30 km away from the nearest bookshop (like I did for 4 years) a phone call to check if the book is available and order it if it is not. Never bought anything on amazon (don't want, don't need), and maybe 10 times online in the last 25 years for very specific stuff.
dingaling · 2 days ago
> search for a book
They don't have it, because they've limited shelf space and only stock popular books that are on best-seller lists. The History of Scruggs Biplanes 1907-1919 isn't one of them.
mjhay · 1 days ago
I assure you they would be more than happy to order it for you.
josefritzishere · 2 days ago
I buy paper books. So far zero have been stolen by Jeff Bezos. They take up a bit of space but there are always trade offs.
munk-a · 2 days ago
If you find yourself with an excess of books buy a bird house and set up a little library[1] somewhere in your neighborhood to outsource that storage and the knowledge contained in those books! I liberally loan books that I love out though the ones I really love go to homes I know will appreciate them.
1. Also called a loan-library in some areas - basically a box that random folks can put books into and take books out of without any strings attached.
wwweston · 2 days ago
I’ve got an old DX. The fact that it doesn’t have net access anymore is now a security feature and an anti distraction mechanism. I can load what I want by USB. It doesn’t do epub3 which is a problem, but it does PDFs and conversion tricks are possible.
The Amazon ecosystem isn’t uniquely untrustworthy, but it’s not where I want to keep future electronic purchases.
lpapez · 2 days ago
There is a very good open source conversion tool called "Calibre". I use it all the time to convert my, erm, security backups of books I own.
mrwh · 2 days ago
I used to read the New York Times on my kindle. It was great: delivered each morning, no waste paper by the afternoon, a simple subscription, etc. I was on my 4th kindle at least, which says more about the use I got out of them than their endurance. And then the service disappeared for reasons I never really understood.
mattmaroon · 2 days ago
It’s cute he thinks Jeff Bezos thinks about this. Whoever made this decision has probably never met anybody who has met Jeff Bezos.
bogrollben · 2 days ago
I have an older kindle and I can still load it with epubs by emailing the unique kindle address. I think there are other ways too, via USB for example.
My understanding is that it's only downloading via the amazon kindle store that is no longer supported for devices that are considered end-of-life, which makes sense to me personally. The kindle web browser is probably based on an ancient android version of chrome. That browser is not going to last forever.
hyperhello · 2 days ago
Nothing is going to happen. Amazon is like a very large redwood tree that is all grown. It has no interest in fire, drought, animal life, human culture, or anything else you value. Your old Kindle is as one of its pinecones on a mantelpiece somewhere.
dinkblam · 2 days ago
on the other hand 14 years of usage of a ~100$ device sounds ok. these days you need to be happy if things last more than a few months…
ThrowawayTestr · 2 days ago
What electronics are you buying that only last a few months?
Ancalagon · 2 days ago
tbh the dev support/infra for the old devices was probably more than the money they were making in sales on those devices. They noticed and just decided to cut them off and that was the extent of that decision.
markstos · 2 days ago
Kobo e-readers can connect directly to library e-book stores and download many titles directly for free from libraries.
rickdeckard · 2 days ago
It's an exceptionally odd decision, but planned for approx. a year now.
- First they stopped allowing download of purchased books for cable-transfer to kindle in 2025.
- Then they amped up their effort to avoid jailbreaking by suddenly releasing more firmware updates than before.
- Now they stopped supporting a wide range of kindles.
Amazon obviously assumes that they sufficiently killed the competition so they don't need to worry about customers leaving.
As for me, I managed to exit on-time, applied a jailbreak on my kindle touch and now buy my books elsewhere...
mmmlinux · 2 days ago
Too bad, I remember when kindles came with a free 3g connection and web browser.
rickdeckard · 2 days ago
funny enough, just noticed on jailbreak that my kindle touch web-browser never lost its "beta" label, in all those years :)
themadturk · 2 days ago
Kobos have web browsers, and they have be in "beta" forever as well.
ahf8Aithaex7Nai · 2 days ago
Great! You currently have just one other comment pointing out that Bezos is no longer CEO, as if that were a piece of information that would make even the slightest difference in this matter. Unfortunately, my comment isn't any more sympathetic either. These people couldn't care less whether you can continue reading the digital books you've already purchased on your existing device or not. And yet you insist on paying for these books instead of just pirating them outright. Sorry, but that's exactly what Nietzsche called "slave morality." You're making a virtue out of clinging to the very structure that disadvantages you. And that whole "commercial incompetence" thing can't really be true, can it? The company dominates e-commerce, and the guy has enough cash to fly into space in his own rocket. So the business hasn't gone under yet just because it missed out on a few book sales to nerds with old devices. I find your whole perspective kind of baffling. I realized right from the start that I would either buy digital books as fully functional PDFs or continue to buy paper books that I could put on my bookshelf, because anything else would amount to exactly what you're describing now. And a small suggestion for improving your workflow: first check to see if the book is available on a torrent site, and only buy it afterward.
6510 · 2 days ago
It's a fascinating bit of biology to see a species collectively sacrifice its well being for the benefit of one man almost entirely without getting something in return.
Not to argue rich people never did anything useful for humanity. The pun is that one may be promoted to great status for doing great things but after that there is no obligation to continue doing great things.
We are in an endless war against the great void and we've appointed many generals who at best couldn't care less about the war and at worse joined the dark side.
You've paid the man and now you get to see books you like fly into the great nothingness. Funny as hell! He showed non of the kindness and generosity he is known for?
You should give him more money, maybe something different happens next time.
haha
ahf8Aithaex7Nai · 2 days ago
> It's a fascinating bit of biology to see a species collectively sacrifice its well being for the benefit of one man
I wouldn't attribute this phenomenon to biology. But in a healthy world, there would have been an intervention by now—at the very least with pitchforks, but ideally through institutional channels. I'm curious to see if that will still happen, or if we'll simply hand the world over to our new feudal overlords without putting up a fight.
6510 · 1 days ago
I think of it as a species trying different formulas until one sticks to the wall. (it never does) Eventually, one way or the other, we will go full grasshopper and burn everything to the ground again, we have that part down to an art.
We will again (proverbially) ride our horse to the saloon with our gun (or sword) hanging from our belt, we will play poker, smoke, drink, sing, dance and hang out with the guys - only to have each one of those things taken away again.
subarctic · 2 days ago
Never been happier that i bought a kobo instead of a kindle years ago
ChicagoDave · 2 days ago
I extracted my books from my kindle over a year ago. Never buying books from Amazon again. EPUB on iOS works great.
cryo32 · 2 days ago
I’m the worst of the worst. I only buy second hand paper books. Then I give them to someone when I’ve read them!
This is incidentally after a kindle phase terminated by Amazon after I returned too much of their third rate junk that didn’t work for me to remain a profitable customer.
Fuck ‘em.
trencedamp · 2 days ago
For those of you who don't want to pirate, there are legal means to do this.
1. But the book on kobo or ebooks 2. Convert it to mobi and transfer it Kindle using calibre
nickpinkston · 2 days ago
Shoutout to https://libro.fm/ which is a non-Amazon Audible that lets you:
- Buy nearly any audiobook that's on Audible or other services
- Donate to your favorite local bookstore
- Get the downloadable audio file without DRM
rickdeckard · 2 days ago
Everybody, get up, we're leaving. Jailbreak your kindles and move to epub. It's not that difficult.
Buy books at Kobo or bookshop.org
There are so many functional kindles out there, this could be the event that changes the power dynamic and puts the author-reader relationship back in the center instead of the publisher/distributor.
It's what's slowly happening in the Movie industry now: The studios learn that they can't create sustainable value by just spending money and adding stars to a production. But directors create value. So they are suddenly put front and center and actively promoted.
cmiles74 · 2 days ago
I’d be curious to see the financials on the Kindle readers, my suspicion is that they very quickly make the cost back through book sales. If retaining customers was a concern they could simply ship people the cheapest reader before cutting service.
It’s straight up greed, IMHO.
notatoad · 2 days ago
Amazon doesn’t care what you do, piracy isn’t a threat to Amazon, they just want to deliver the drm that the publishers demand in the easiest way possible. And they’ve made a fairly reasonable business decision that a customer who hasn’t bought a new kindle in ~15 years isn’t an important source of revenue worth supporting old devices for.
And yeah, it sucks. But it’s the ecosystem you bought into when you bought a kindle. This is what drm does. If you care about open systems, support them.
swframe2 · 1 days ago
It's my understanding that when you purchase content you get a license that is limited to terms the seller defines (i.e. only if the content is delivered from seller's approved data sources, only if the content is viewed on a seller approved device, only if the content has a seller approved drm, etc).